MA Material and Visual Culture

About the programme

This programme is designed as an advanced research degree
providing exposure to a vanguard and creative field within anthropology and
related disciplines.

In the first term the
core course will introduce students to recent ethnographic writing on visual, material
and digital culture, explore the contribution of key thinkers in the field and
engage a number of key theoretical paradigms. The second term students will be
presented with a wide range of case studies highlighting material culture in
the wider world - ranging from art, through photography, clothing, consumption,
cultural memory, monuments and the built environment with a view to exploring
how these might be illuminated from a material culture perspective.

During the year students will also have the opportunity to take
three specialist options from a range of courses offered within the Department.
Finally they will be able to concentrate on a single topic, involving their own
original research, through a dissertation at the end of the year.

The programme is suitable both for those with a prior degree in
anthropology and for those with degrees in neighbouring disciplines who wish to
be trained in anthropological and related approaches to material and visual
culture.

The degree can lead to
further doctoral research or careers in a wide range of areas such as
architecture, media, commerce and aspects of development work, where an emphasis
on the material and visual environment is central.

Timeline

The MA is nominally
completed in one year of full-time study or two years of part-time.
In the autumn term students enrol in the Material and Visual Culture core
course (and at least one optional course), followed in the spring term by the
second half of the core course and 2 optional courses. The two-hour written
exam is administered in the third term (usually in May), and the bulk of
dissertation research and writing is conducted between May and August, with
submission in mid-September.

Those studying part-time are restricted to enrollment in the core course
in their first year (with the exam in term 3 of that year), while optional
courses and dissertation research/writing normally occur in the second year.

The MA in Material and Visual Culture is based on the
following components:

1. Core course in Material and Visual
Culture

This is taught over two terms. The course is examined by a
combination of a 2,500 word essay, a methodology practical, and a
written examination at the end of the year.

Note that the aim of
the practical skills training component of the core course is not to provide
comprehensive fluency in technique (since we deal with a wide range of
applications over the period) but to give enough sense of each technique that a
student can envisage how and why these might be incorporated into
anthropological research.

2. Optional courses

Students take three
optional courses, at least two of which are typically from among those taught by
Material & Visual Culture staff. These courses are examined by one essay
each of 3,000 words, worth 8.33% of the course grade each.

Anthropology of Art & Design

Mass Consumption and Design

Anthropology of the Built Environment

Anthropology and Photography

Advanced Topics in Digital Culture

Transforming and Creating the World: Anthropological Perspectives on Techniques and Technology

3. Masters Research Methods seminar

Typically 16-18 sessions are convened within the Research
Methods seminar over the academic year. These sessions are made available to
all masters students, and while only six are usually compulsory for students in
the programme they may attend as many additional
sessions as they wish. The Research Methods seminars vary from year
to year but typically include the following sessions:

Participant observation

Ethics

Investigating space and
place

Interviews (I & II)

Questionnaires (I &
II)

Sampling

Using new technologies
for research

PRA (participatory rural
appraisal)

Photography

Against method

Investigating kinship
and relatedness

Ethnographic writing

Fieldnotes

Film

Historical sources

Researching ritual

4. Dissertation

A 15,000 word dissertation
to be submitted by mid September of each year, conducted under the supervision
of a member of the material and visual culture staff, on an agreed topic. This
will count for 50% of the overall mark.

Some recent titles of MSc dissertations
include:

Last Thoughts: Toward an
Anthropology of Shoes

Spectacular Politics & the
Image: Tamil Cinema and the Making of History

Doing
the Best for Children on a Budget: Food Consumption Practices of Mothers on a
Limited Income

5. A weekly seminar series

A weekly seminar series in Material and
Visual Culture, with invited international speakers. Not examined.

This diagram
illustrates the individually assessed components of the programme. The area of
each box is proportional to its weighting (the upper layer represents the core course,
the middle layer the options, and the bottom half the dissertation).

Current Course Tutors:

Victor Buchli

Victor Buchli works on architecture, domesticity, the
archaeology of the recent past, critical understandings of materiality and new
technologies and the anthropology of sustainability and design. He also teaches
on the UCL Urban Studies MSc and
supervises on the Mphil/PhD programme at the Bartlett and serves on
the Board of the Victoria and
Albert/Royal College of Art MA History of Design Programme. He has conducted
fieldwork in Russia, Britain and more
recently in Kazakhstan, where he
concluded research based on a neighbourhood ethnography in the new capitol of Astana, Kazakhstan, examining
questions of materiality, architecture and urbanism in the post-socialist
period. In addition, he is writing a new book Immateriality which examines the
significance of material cultures that paradoxically attempt to deny their own
physicality and another entitled The Anthropology of Architecture (Berg 2011).

Currently he is starting new research in new materials
and new technologies examining the rise of rapid manufacturing or 3-D printing.
This research is part of a co-organised ESRC funded intiative entitled New
Materials, New Technologies with Susanne Kuechler and Graeme Were in UCL
Anthropology and Materials Sciences at Kings College London. In addition, he is
a member of the Eco-Town Delivery Consortium: an industry based knowledge
transfer initiative examining the development of carbon neutral living through
which he is conducting a long term ethnographic project ‘Assembling the Carbon
Neutral Subject’ and supervising research into the anthropology of ecologically
sustainable development and design. More recently he has begun work as a member
of the interdisciplinary Templeton Scholars Group on the origins of domesticity
at the Neolithic site of Çatal Höyük in Turkey where he is
examining long term culture change and processes of material iteration and
innovation.

Ludovic Coupaye

Coupaye focuses on the arts and anthropology of
the Pacific, with an emphasis on the groups, material cultures and technologies
of Melanesia. His doctoral thesis (SRU/UEA 2005), was
titled Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships: Outlining the Technical
System of Long Yam Cultivation and Display among the Abelam of Nyamikum Village
(East Sepik Province, Papua New
Guinea). He is currently
writing on the magic and social life of ritual objects among the Abelam.

Haidy Geismar

Haidy
Geismar came to UCL from the Dept. of Anthropology at NYU,
where she was assistant professor in anthropology and in museum studies and
taught courses on digital culture. She has written extensively on museums,
issues of cultural property and archives, and has conducted fieldwork in New
Zealand and Vanuatu. Her book Treasured Possessions will be out later this year
with Duke University Press. She has papers in many leading journals such as
American Ethnologist, Journal of Material Culture Studies, Comparative Studies
in History and Society. She is joint founder editor of www.materialworldblog.com

Susanne Kuechler

Küchler is currently working on a new
manuscript, which develops the theoretical implications of her past
ethnographic research into the making of sculpture and the cognitive work of
images. The Material Mind takes insights into the nature of innovation, won
during long-term and collaborative research on the take up and transformation
of cloth in the Pacific, to the context of the development of ‘mindware’ in
laboratories. The manuscript offers a critical review of the existing
theorisation of the aesthetics of the material [Materialästhetik] and sets out
a new vision for the study of sculptural art and design, which takes into
account the interface between the material and the cognitive as symptomatic of
knowledge economies. Geographical: South Pacific; Papua New
Guinea, New Ireland; Polynesia, the Cook Islands. And
laboratories. September 2005-July2006: Invited Fellow at the
Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin: The library
research conducted during the year of residency concerned the evolving
technology and fabrics supporting wearable computing and investigated its
implications for the theory and methodology of material culture and
anthropology. ‘Smart’ clothes and ambient intelligence provoke questions of how
notions of mind and of life inform and are informed by prototyping, where it is
the functionality of collections of artefacts which supports systemic relations
between artefacts, and where a sociality with objects is mediated by such
inter-artefactual relations. The initial work on the manuscript also concerned
itself with a critique of current work on innovation, directing attention to
the need for anthropological research to be conducted on the social history of
the prototype in order to develop new methodologies and theories capable of
handling emerging futures.

Daniel Miller

Miller has carried several research projects on
the media which have resulted in publications including The
Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (with
D. Slater) Berg: Oxford 2000 and The
Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (with
H Horst) Berg: Oxford 2006, Tales
from Facebook Polity 2011, and with Dr. M
Madianou of Cambridge University Migration and New Media: transnationalism and polymedia (Routledge
Sept 2011). He is currently working on the impact of social networking and
webcam on transnational relationships and within Trinidad.

Chris Tilley

Tilley is a UCL specialist in archaeology, material culture and social identity. He
has written a number of books on archaeological theory exploring the
relations between hermeneutic, structuralist and post-structuralist
perspectives and material culture.

Chris Tilley's research falls into two main areas (i) the exploration
of different theoretical perspectives in relation to the study of
material culture and (ii) the relationship of these perspectives to the
study of substantive archaeological and ethnographic data sets. These
concerns are reflected in his publications. Theoretically he have explored
the use and value of structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist,
hermeneutic and phenomenological perspectives. His substantive analyses
have been very broad and wide ranging including the following: studies of museums and tourism, modern material culture, contemporary and prehistoric landscapes, topography and monuments, Bronze Age Scandinavian rock art, The Neolithic in south Scandinavia, Brittany, Britain and Malta, Artefact construction, ethnicity, heritage and identity in the western Pacific (Vanuatu), Landscape and installation art, Contemporary residential gardens and gardening in Sweden and England.

Chris Pinney

Pinney's research has a strong geographic focus in central India:
initial ethnographic research was concerned with village-resident factory
workers. Subsequently he researched popular photographic practices and the
consumption of Hindu chromolithographs in the same area. His publications
combine contemporary ethnography with the historical archaeology of particular
media (see eg. Camera Indica and Photos of the Gods). The
Coming of Photography in India, based on the Panizzi Lectures was
published by the British Library in October 2008.

He is currently interested in cultural spaces which conventional social theory
has tended to neglect: “more than local and less than global”, and spaces of
cultural flow that elude the west. In addition to ongoing projects with an
Indian focus (for instance, a filmic record of two central Indian Dalit
intellectuals) he is also working on visual dimensions of cultural encounters
from 1492 to the present, and thinking through Kracauer’s later work and the
question of ‘multiple temporalities’. Current book projects include, Photography
and Anthropology (forthcoming from Reaktion in April 2011), Zoom:
Seeing and Believing in Colonial and Postcolonial India,Lessons From
Hell (concerned with popular Indian depictions of punishment), a ‘visual
history’ of modern India,
and Visual Encounters.